UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
Richard Heck, a 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died earlier this month (October 9) in a Manila, Philippines hospital, following years of illness, Reuters reported. He was 84.
Heck earned his bachelor’s and doctorate degrees at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1950s. As a faculty member at the University of Delaware, he discovered the eponymous “Heck reaction,” which connects carbon atoms using a metal called palladium. The discovery impacted DNA sequencing, drug discoveries, and the electronics industry. Heck shared the 2010 chemistry Nobel with two other chemists; all three were recognized for their work on carbon atom linkages.
“Almost every pharmaceutical that is made today is made using these organo-palladium couplings,” Douglass Taber, a chemist at the University of Delaware, where Heck was an emeritus professor, told The New York Times.
Heck retired to Manila in 1989 with his wife,...
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